Morning Routine: What Successful Bloggers Do When They Wake Up

I don’t know about you but if I waited to start work until after I ate breakfast half my day would be wasted. Think about it. What do you normally do before you eat breakfast?

If you’re like most people you have a cup of coffee while you check the weather report or scan the newspaper. Then you grab another cup of coffee and watch the morning news, maybe throw in a load of laundry and make the bed. By the time you’re hungry and awake enough to eat you’ve been up a couple of hours, and what have you really accomplished? Nothing.

Instead of wasting two hours every morning, spend that time working on your blog. You’d be amazed at how much you can accomplish in a short amount of time.

Before You Go To Bed

Before you go to bed, prioritize your To-Do list for the next day. Include the word “Breakfast” in big, bold letters and then list everything you need to accomplish before you can stop for breakfast. Be realistic. Obviously, you’re not going to be able to cover your whole list before breakfast and you don’t want to end up making yourself sick.

Things To Do Before Breakfast

Your list of things to do before breakfast may differ from mine because we each have our own peak writing times and our tasks will probably vary. My peak writing time is right after breakfast, so I like to get a lot of little tasks out of the way beforehand so I can focus on content creation when I’m at my best.

The key is to start at the top of your To-Do list and work your way down. Focus on one item at a time and don’t move on until you’ve completed the task. And don’t stop for breakfast until you get to “BREAKFAST.”

Check your email – I check my email twice a day, once in the morning and again at the end of the day when I’m making my To-Do list for the next day.

Update your post schedule – I keep an ongoing post schedule that includes the post topic for the day, the purpose for that post, and the call to action I want to focus on. Each day I scan the schedule and add another day at the end so I always have 30 days worth of post ideas ready to go.

Moderate and reply to comments – This quiet time before breakfast allows me to focus on comments and look for questions or problems my readers might have.

Check stats – I don’t check stats every day but when I do I check them before breakfast before I get bogged down in day-to-day tasks.

Plan your day – I save this step for last so I can make adjustments to my Things-To-Do list based on everything else I do before breakfast. I may have to respond to an urgent email or craft a quick post to answer a question that popped up in reader comments. Or maybe I saw a post that got a lot of hits the day before and I want to adjust my post schedule to create something relevant that I can link to.

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3 Comments

Elizabeth

I think this is a great suggestion. I know, for myself, that my best writing time is before breakfast, before the newspaper or blog-checking. The writing is never so easy as early in the morning. The trick is getting the writing done when I have certain things that must also be done before breakfast.

Like Elizabeth, I do my best writing before breakfast when the house is quiet. But you’re correct, it’s important to put that time to good use, no matter which tasks you tackle in the early morning hours.

Nice tips. One thing I do different to you that’s really helped my productivity is that I don’t open emails until 11am each morning. Like you I open them at the end of the day and add stuff into my future plans based on what I read but I don’t open the email again first thing the next morning.

I reserve those first few hours for important working on my business stuff and then open emails at 11am once that work is done.